Normandy: Looking For The Elephant And The Needle In Etretat.

How could one resist taking a vacation when you get four days in a row of uncharged leave? For the 4th of July weekend, we had Friday-Monday off, so we decided that it would be the perfect time to hop over the English Channel and travel to Normandy. We had planned this trip even before Robert decided to go to Normandy with Alex as part of their Cub Scouts’ trip. And I’d already bought our tickets for the chunnel which turned out to cost me only 8 British pounds (around $13) because I used a lot of Tesco (supermarket here) points and vouchers to buy our train ticket. Fabulous!
We left early in the morning, but not early enough to avoid horrible traffic. As we got on our proper route to Folkestone via A14, we turned on the radio only to hear traffic update with horrible news—A14 is shut down near Stansted because of a lorry that turned over and spilled….glue…no joke. That motorway had been shut down overnight already and was not going to be reopened until later that morning. We changed our route on our SatNav to go through A1, a normally fast motorway that turned out to be crawling as well. That is the road that leads us from the North to M25, a major London orbital road…apparently half of England was on it that morning. Whatever the case, we missed our schedule train time and were bumped on the next available train, but it still set us back by about an hour and a half.

Getting into France was pretty uneventful—people at the customs just waved us in when we passed passport control. Are they not afraid of immigrants like the UK is?

Our first stop was at a fabulous, beautiful, charming and unexpectedly cozy town of Etretat.

It’s a coastal town with cute narrow streets and pebbled beach. I’ll tell you why it’s famous in a sec. But first, you MUST get a pain au chocolate. YUM!

The day we visited, the weather was just perfect for a quick walk up the hill for the majestic view of…

Do you recognize that cliff behind us? That is the famous cliff called The Elephant And The Needle that inspired Claude Monet (he was from Normandy) to paint this sort of pictures:

And we were right there!! How amazing is that?

After we climbed up the hill to enjoy the view…

…Robert decided to walk down the path with Mark to check out what’s there.

Two very unenthusiastic kids wanted to stay behind and poke in the dirt rather than walk around.

But I told them that we would look for a way down to the beach and they changed their mind.

We all walked down a bit further down to see those beautiful white cliffs in the background. Somehow they looked even more breathtaking than the ones at Dover.

Robert didn’t stop there though. He led us even further down a very narrow and steep stairwell.

And further down…

And further down…

First we found this rocky patch, but it was not really a beach, just a rock that was uncovered because of the low tide.

After some exploring around we found this very suspiciously looking cave/tunnel. And of course, Robert led everyone through that tunnel since we saw there was a light at the end of the tunnel.

After climbing down some random wooden ladder and jumping off little cliffs, we found the “beach”! It was actually the continuation of the beach that was in the central part of town but a bit further away from all the people.

The water was quite refreshing (i.e. COLD!). It was still so nice to take a break in this beautiful place.

Pebbles really hurt our (grown-ups’) feet but kids had no issues. I keep remembering spending summers in Crimea on pebbly beaches and never had a problem.

Kids enjoyed throwing pebbles and trying their best not to tumble in the water (the bank was quite steep, although it doesn’t look like it).

We left Etretat with a two-hour drive ahead of us. So glad we stopped here! And we found The Elephant And The Needle:).

Lyana.